As part of your cloud migration strategy, you’ve spent months or years meticulously setting up your enterprise cloud infrastructure, envisioning a future of smooth application migrations and improved operations. However, your migrations are crawling at a snail's pace, departments are operating in silos and there's no organization or ownership in your migration endeavors. This leads to frustration and the question of, What’s next? How do you bridge the gap between your cloud goals and the increasingly slow migration process?
In this blog, I’ll cover the main challenges impacting app migration teams, and provide insights on how to overcome application migration challenges and ensure your cloud initiatives flow quickly, and seamlessly.
Top cloud migration challenges for large enterprises
1. Planning
Organizations often stumble when defining the initial scope and goals of their cloud migration projects. Ambiguity can lead to misdirection, wasted resources, and delays. Identifying key stakeholders is paramount and without this step, and assigning clear ownership, decision-making becomes convoluted, creating confusion around the entire migration process.
2. Internal training and cultural shifts
App migration isn't just about moving data and applications—it's also a cultural shift within an organization. It impacts not only the technology but also the people who build, deploy, and use the applications. Inadequate training for employees on how to navigate the new cloud environment and utilize the proper tools available can result in resistance, decreased productivity, and may result in loss of potential for getting the most out of your cloud initiatives.
3. Technology
Adopting new technology is not a straightforward process. It involves learning new tools, integrating them with existing systems, and ensuring they align with the company’s strategic objectives. Managing onboarding services can also add technology challenges. Each service could have its own set of requirements, dependencies, and potential conflicts, which need to be managed to ensure a smooth transition. Technology complexities can slow down the migration process, increase costs, and introduce unnecessary risk if not managed appropriately.
4. Organizational disarray
Beyond the technical aspects, organizational challenges often prove to be one of the most daunting challenges. Various departments within an organization may simultaneously request assistance with their app migrations, leading to chaos and resource allocation dilemmas. Lack of prioritization can result in critical applications not being migrated to the cloud on time, which can negatively impact business operations. Managing a multitude of deployments, especially in larger organizations, can quickly become overwhelming. Inadequate alignment between departments can create silos, hindering collaboration and creating inefficiencies.
Ensuring fast, streamlined application migrations
In the quest for faster, smoother application migrations to the cloud, organizations have found a game-changing solution: the Cloud Governance Committee (CGC). This approach tackles the most pressing challenges faced by large enterprises during application migration head-on.
Formation of a Cloud Governance Committee
One of the most impactful solutions to cloud migration challenges is the establishment of a Cloud Governance Committee. This team is comprised of key functional groups such as Information Security, Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Engineering, and App Development. It can also consist of any other stakeholders as required by regulations e.g. Legal and Compliance. The committee serves as a central governing body and it ensures that the architecture aligns with approved patterns, conducts rigorous information security assessments, and provides recommendations for the best path forward on cloud engineering and costing. The committee also ensures transparent communication among stakeholders, enabling effective prioritization of migration projects and efficient allocation of resources to keep things on track.
End-to-end process establishment
Within the framework of the CGC, an end-to-end process for app onboarding to the cloud is established. This process, meticulously designed and continuously refined through regular committee sessions, serves as a roadmap for each migration. The committee maintains detailed records, including meeting minutes and data analyses, ensuring that every aspect of the migration is accounted for and visible to all stakeholders. The committee also maintains records that are important for regulatory reporting and external audits and is responsible for mitigating risks by adopting to regulatory guidelines. This level of organization streamlines the migration process and creates a repository of knowledge that can be leveraged for future migrations.
Collaborative stakeholder engagement
Perhaps the most important aspect of the CGC lies in the collaboration between stakeholders. By creating an environment where departments work together, share knowledge, and collectively prioritize projects, the organization can leverage the collective expertise of its workforce. Prioritization becomes informed and strategic, and ensures that critical applications are migrated first, minimizing disruptions to business operations. Efficient allocation of resources ensures that the right expertise is available when and where it's needed, leading to a smooth and coordinated migration effort.
So how does the Cloud Governance Committee address the four cloud migration challenges?
1. Planning
In terms of planning, the CGC serves as a central governing body, ensuring that key stakeholders are actively engaged in the migration process. Through transparent communication and well-defined decision-making processes, the CGC fosters clarity of purpose, defining the initial scope and goals of migration projects with precision.
2. Internal training and cultural shifts
The CGC facilitates the development of training programs tailored to the specific needs of employees. By creating a culture of continuous learning and change management, the CGC ensures that employees are well-equipped to navigate the new cloud environment, mitigate resistance and boost productivity.
3. Technology
The Cloud Governance Committee provides technology expertise and oversight to ensure that the migration aligns with the organization’s strategic objectives. To simplify the process, the committee leverages the power of Azure services. Azure’s comprehensive suite of cloud services, including Azure Migrate and Azure Site Recovery, provides essential tools for assessment, migration, and seamless app replication. By reducing the complexity of managing onboarding services, these tools help streamline the migration process and mitigate potential risks, thereby facilitating a smoother transition to the cloud.
4. Organizational disarray
Lastly, the CGC's collaborative approach ensures streamlined coordination among various departments. By prioritizing migration projects based on their criticality and efficiently allocating resources, the CGC prevents chaos and resource allocation dilemmas, ensuring that essential applications are migrated promptly. Through the CGC's strategic oversight, large enterprises can surmount these challenges, fostering a smooth and coordinated migration effort while maximizing the benefits of cloud initiatives.
The bottom line – tangible business outcomes
We've witnessed remarkable transformations in organizations by increasing the app migrations capacity by 200%. Implementing a Cloud Governance Committee has unquestionably reshaped the cloud migration landscape. What were once slow and cumbersome migrations have evolved into rapid, efficient processes, highlighting the impact of careful planning and collaboration. This substantial reduction in migration time, from an average of one year to six months, signifies the real advantages of our streamlined efforts.
The outcome? A seamless transition that minimizes disruptions and downtime, all while significantly boosting the performance and operational efficiency of post-migration applications.
The impact of faster cloud application migrations
- Reduced downtime: Faster migration means less time offline, ensuring minimal disruption to business operations.
- Improved productivity: Swift migrations enable employees to resume work promptly, boosting overall productivity.
- Cost savings: Shorter migration times translate to reduced labor costs and lower operational expenses.
- Agility and scalability: Faster migrations enable enterprises to adapt quickly to changing business needs and scale operations as required.
- Increased ROI: Faster migrations lead to quicker realization of ROI on cloud investments, driving financial benefits sooner.
The path forward
Navigating app migration challenges can be complex, but with Alithya's expertise, success is achievable. We provide a clear path to overcome hurdles, guiding you with innovative solutions and proven strategies, including CGC and collaborative stakeholder engagement. Trust us to streamline your application migration journey.
Accelerate your cloud initiatives with Alithya
Leveraging decades of cloud expertise and industry experience, Alithya helps you accelerate your cloud-adoption initiatives, no matter where you are in the process. We assist you in cutting IT costs and modernizing your apps without interruption to your existing processes. Our team of strategy and implementation experts guides you every step of the way so you can evolve your systems without interrupting your operations.
Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help you optimize your cloud investments by streamlining and accelerating your application migrations.